


When the Floods Roll Back

by Wynn



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: A dash of violence, AU, And some alcohol, F/M, Fusion with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Prompt Fic, Some adult language, Some bad fashion sense, Vampire AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 04:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4046617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wynn/pseuds/Wynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky peered back at the table, at the man who now sat opposite the woman. Or not just sat. He leaned on the table, invading the woman’s space, his eyes intent upon her. If that were Becca, hell, if that were Natasha, even though Bucky knew she could handle men twice that size, Bucky would be over there doing something stupid right about now. But he didn’t know this girl, and she must have allowed the man to sit down, what with the way she wasn’t running away screaming. But she wasn’t quite comfortable either, her smile no longer reaching her eyes and stiffness in her laughter as she responded to his joke.<br/>-<br/>Or the one where Bucky encounters Darcy and her creepy ass date in a bar and contemplates doing something stupid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Floods Roll Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sevenfoxes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/gifts).



> This kind of got away from me. As things usually do. Because I have no self control. Based on a prompt from sevensneakyfoxes: “Bucky/Darcy. IDK, how about a vampire AU? or some sort of weird supernatural AU. Don't care if it's set in canon or a complete alternate universe.” 
> 
> Title from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I do not own the characters used in the following story. They are owned by Marvel and Joss Whedon/Twentieth Century Fox and are being used for non-profit, entertainment purposes only.
> 
> Bucky’s comment in the story about women saying yes when they mean no is an attempt to convey how women sometimes deflect and go along with unwanted attention rather than say no because of fear of a man’s response.

i’m gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back.  
\- buffy summers, ‘buffy the vampire slayer’

*

There was something wrong with that guy. Bucky was sure of it. As he waited for Clint to bring the beer, he glanced over his shoulder at the man standing by the young woman’s table. Nothing leapt to mind as obviously off. The man’s clothes were nondescript, a black button-up paired with jeans and some ugly loafers, the kind that Bucky remembers his dad wearing when Bucky was young. Nondescript fit the rest of the guy too. Medium height and medium weight topped by bland features that unfortunately brightened into something close to striking when he smiled. 

Which he did now. 

Bucky narrowed his eyes as the young woman returned the smile. Neither bland nor nondescript described her. Even from this distance and despite her glasses, Bucky saw the vivid blue of her eyes. Dark hair and pale skin and lush pink lips, she brought to mind Snow White from the fairy tales that Bucky used to read to Becca when she was small. Or maybe Little Red Riding Hood, the woman clad in a loose red dress and—

“Barnes, you okay?”

Head whipping around, Bucky looked at Clint, at the four bottles now on the bar before him. “Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I was… distracted.”

Clint peered past him to the woman at the table. The smirk that formed half a second later made Bucky sigh. “I bet you were.”

“Not like that,” Bucky said, resisting the urge to look again. “The guy.”

The smirk twisted into a frown. “Really? Him?”

Now Bucky rolled his eyes. “Not like _that_. Doesn’t something seem… off about that guy?”

Clint looked once more at the table. His eyes darted between the man and the woman, assessing, lingering on the man a few seconds before he looked back at Bucky. “Maybe. Kind of bland, I guess, given who she was with last night.”

Bucky tried for casual. “Who was that?” 

The resurgent smirk informed him of his failure. “Big blond guy,” Clint said as a patron further down the bar signaled to him. “And by big I mean huge. Huger than Steve. Epic hair too.”

Bucky peered back at the table, at the man who now sat opposite the woman. Or not just sat. He leaned on the table, invading the woman’s space, his eyes intent upon her. If that were Becca, hell, if that were Natasha, even though Bucky knew she could handle men twice that size, Bucky would be over there doing something stupid right about now. But he didn’t know this girl, and she must have allowed the man to sit down, what with the way she wasn’t running away screaming. But she wasn’t quite comfortable either, her smile no longer reaching her eyes and stiffness in her laughter as she responded to his joke.

“Aw, hell.”

Bucky looked back at Clint. “What?”

“You.”

“What? I haven’t done anything.”

“Yet,” Clint said as he started to back away. “Just take it outside when you do. I can’t afford you breaking any more tables when you play the knight, okay?”

Bucky held up his hands. “Okay. I’ll take it outside.”

“Good. ‘Cause that’s where they’re going.”

Bucky jerked back around. The woman now stood by her chair. She looped her bag around her chest and fell into step with the man as they turned for the exit. “Shit.” Turning around, he was about to appeal to Clint to take the beer to the table, only to find him at the other end of the bar helping a different patron. Cursing, he grabbed the bottles and darted over to his table.

“Finally,” Natasha said when he returned. “I was beginning to think—”

“Here,” Bucky said as he thrust the bottles at Steve and Sam. 

Frowning, Steve claimed the two held out to him. “Buck, what—”

“The guy,” he said, already turning away. “The guy with the girl. I got to go.”

Now Natasha frowned. “The one with the loafers?”

Bucky nodded but didn’t stop to continue the conversation. She already knew, she probably did from the moment they’d walked into the bar. She’d follow if she thought he needed help, if he were too long or the fight too much, and so would Steve and Sam.

At the exit, he paused. The night had grown cooler the hour he’d been inside, not enough to drive away the downtown crowd. Searching through the milling people around the front door, Bucky caught a flash of red to his right. He pushed through the crowd in time to see the same flash disappear down the alley that ran beside the bar. Heart beating fast, Bucky followed. He stopped in the entrance, spotting them about fifteen feet inside, the man moving to crowd the woman up against the brick wall.

“Is everything all right here?” he asked, starting forward.

Both the man and the woman jerked their heads toward him. In the ambient light from the street behind him, Bucky saw the man scowl at him. Understandable. The woman, though, looked not with appreciation or relief, but instead with surprise and a bit of fear.

“Everything’s fine,” the man said as Bucky approached. “Least ‘til you showed up.”

Bucky frowned at him. “I wasn’t asking you.” Turning to the woman, he softened his expression and his voice and said again, “Are you okay?”

She nodded, a quick bob of her head. “Yep. Everything’s great, dude. Peachy keen.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded again. “Thanks for the check in, but I’m fine. You should, uh, go back inside. You don’t want your beer getting warm.”

Bucky stared at her, whatever chagrin that he felt at her knowing he’d been watching stamped out by the way she clutched her bag and the quick slide of her eyes back toward the man.

“I—”

The man leaned away from the woman then and turned toward Bucky. “She said she was fine. Now get gone before I get you gone.”

Bucky glared at the man, his jaw tight, his body tense, prepped for a fight. “Sometimes a woman says yes when she really means no. Most often to ward off jerks like you who won’t take no for an answer.”

The man narrowed his eyes at Bucky. He started forward, his hands clenched, then the woman darted around the man to stand between them. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s cool it with the testosterone overload, okay? I—”

She didn’t finish as the man shoved past her, knocking her back into the wall. As she cursed, Bucky fell into position, his right foot easing behind him, adrenaline beginning to buzz through his veins, but then the streetlamp flickered or a cloud passed over the moon for the man’s face changed, his eyes brightened, or they yellowed, and his expression shifted, or his face did, the bones sliding around like loose tectonic plates into an arrangement straight from Picasso by way of hell.

Eyes widening, Bucky eased a step back. “What the—”

The man before him smiled. Wide enough to expose two sharp fangs. 

Mouth dropping open, Bucky watched as the man tensed to lunge, but rather than leap forward, toward Bucky and his inevitable demise, the man was jerked backwards by something and hurled into the dumpster at the end of the alley. Eyes and mouth still wide, Bucky spotted the woman standing where the man had been just moments before, in the midst of lowering her arm from when she had apparently thrown the man— thing— man thing— into the dumpster, which had buckled and cracked from the impact.

Bucky looked from one to the other, from the man to the dumpster to the woman, who ducked her head and began digging through her bag. “Did you…” he asked, only to stop, shift his focus, and look at the man dazed in the dumpster. “He… He had—”

“Breath like death and the ugliest shoes ever.”

“Uh, _no_ ,” Bucky said, turning back to her. “He had yellow eyes. And fangs. Actual fangs. That glistened in the moonlight. And his face… Fuck.”

The quite shocking information did not, in fact, shock the woman. She continued to paw through her bag as she said, perfectly normal, “Yep. All part and parcel of your garden variety vampire.”

Bucky’s head whipped back toward the man as he began to stir. “What?”

“Vampire,” she said again. “The pale and pasty. Bloodsuckers extraordinaire. They who cringe in the face of garlic and pointy wood.”

“They don’t—”

“They do.”

“But…” He drifted off mid-protest, the scene before him, the yellow eyes, Cro-Magnon face, and actual fangs possessed by the man, undeniable. “Holy shit.”

The woman snorted. “That about covers it.”

“I— Wait,” Bucky said as he turned toward her. “You knew? You knew what he was when you came out here with him?”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course I did. I came here looking for him.”

Bucky gaped at her a second before speaking. “Why the hell would you do that?”

She shrugged. “It’s kind of my job.”

Bucky blinked at her. “Your job?”

“Yep.”

He blinked again. “Your job… is to make out with vampires?”

The woman stopped searching long enough to give him a look. “Gross, dude. I may have dated some creeps in my life, but I’ve got standards. A pulse is one of them.”

Some of his shock vanished beneath the force of her glare. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”

“So there was the werewolf. But that was one date! And I didn’t even _know_ he was a werewolf when I went out with him. I thought he was an accountant.”

“I— what?” 

“And, yeah, okay, I kind of made out with a Norse god. But he looked like Robin Hood. Like a slutty Robin Hood. How could I resist?”

“Uh…” Bucky didn’t answer the question, not that he knew how to answer it, slutty Robin Hood Norse gods as previously fictional yet apparently actual as vampires and werewolves and who knew what else in the world, because the vampire was starting to stand from the crumpled dumpster. “Uh,” he said again, lifting his arm to point.

The woman followed his arm. “Oh. Right.” She bent back over her bag and resumed her search. After a moment, she let out a triumphant cry. 

And pulled out an eight-inch wooden stake.

Before Bucky could react, she said, “Here. Hold this,” and tossed him her bag. Only multiple years of training and sparring saved him from dumping her bag and its contents onto the dirty ground. As it is, the opening gaped wide enough for him to see, in the midst of other odds and ends, a small tazer by a bag of licorice and a cracked iPod by a bottle of, reputedly, holy water and a crumpled piece of paper with the address to Clint’s bar written on it in loopy purple ink.

A low growl caught his attention then. Bucky looked up to see the vampire lunge at the woman. He was about to dump the bag onto the ground and rush to help when she sidestepped the lunge, reared back, and kicked the vampire in the ass in a move so quick and smooth that Bucky’s jaw dropped again. The vampire tumbled into the brick wall of the bar, but before he could get his bearings and charge again, the woman darted forward and shoved the stake into his back. The vampire froze, stood suspended in the shadows, and then began to disintegrate, crumbling into a pile of dust that billowed and swirled in the cool night air.

The woman waved a hand in front of her face to blow away some of the bits. “Gross.”

“I think that might be the understatement of the century there.”

She lowered her hand. In the faint light at the end of the alley, he saw her smile. “You’re doing pretty well there, dude—”

“Bucky.”

She gave a nod of acknowledgement, but not her name. “You’re doing pretty well there, Bucky. Most people scream or faint or go kind of nuts when they learn the truth.”

“Already have. Went nuts, I mean.” At the tilt of her head, he clarified. “Army vet. I’m better now,” he added quickly, feeling the back of his neck heat with a blush. “So I… Uh, here’s your bag.”

He started forward then, slowly, his arm outstretched and his eyes on the ground. He could kick himself. He _would_ kick himself, later, back in his apartment, for his big fucking mouth. Every time now he said something stupid, ever since— 

“And now?” she asked, breaking him from his thoughts. “What do you do?” She smiled at him as he met her eyes. “Besides rescuing damsels from bloodsucking fiends.”

Bucky stopped before her. “I’m a firefighter.” 

She nodded, the hint of a smile still about her mouth. Bucky felt his breath catch at the sight of it, at the gleam in her eyes, warm and wry and overall kind. 

“So,” Bucky said as he held out her bag, “is this your job? Dissolving vampires.”

She claimed her bag from him and dumped her stake inside. “Slaying’s the technical term. And it’s more of a calling than a job.”

Bucky raised his brows. “A calling?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “It sounds cooler than it is. I mean, I get, like, _superpowers_ and I don’t even have to exercise, but it’s fighting evil all the freaking time, and that sucks because it’s, you know, evil, and there’s no pay, _ever_ , not even when I save the world.”

Bucky gaped for half a second before he kicked his brain into gear. “Have you done that a lot?”

She shrugged again as she threw her bag over her shoulder. “Couple of times.”

He continued to stare, though he tried not to, staring creepy and Bucky definitely not wanting to come across as one of the creeps. Not with her, his instinct about her on the mark, more than a gorgeous face to draw him in, because there were lots of pretty dames he’d seen in the bar since his discharge two years ago, but few that pulled him in as quickly and as thoroughly as she did.

“Well then,” he said, striving for casual, “you should let me buy you a drink. To thank you for your rescue from my attempt at rescuing.”

The woman eyed him, hesitating, or maybe contemplating.

Bucky sent her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I promise I’m not a vampire.”

A smile bloomed across her face then. “Oh, yeah. That I already know.”

A bit of his old self surfaced, transformed reassuring into cheeky. “Do you now? I don’t remember you checking for a pulse.”

“I don’t need to.” Her mouth twitched in amusement as she took him in. “You don’t look like a fashion reject from times past.”

“Okay, now you’ve got to come in. A rescue and an ego boost deserve a drink and some buffalo wings. They’re really good here. My buddy Clint owns the bar, and it’s the one kind of cooking he does right.”

“It’s important cooking. That and breakfast.” 

Heart beating fast, Bucky jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “There’s a diner down the street, breakfast all day if you’d rather… Or you don’t— You might be seeing someone.”

She shook her head, but she didn’t say yes either. Instead, she peered at him, her teeth worrying her bottom lip. Bucky waited for her to decide; he steeled himself for the soft no. But after a few moments, she said to him, “How’d you know? To come out here, if you didn’t know he was a vampire.”

Bucky shrugged. He ducked his head, tried to find the words for a feeling, for an itch at the back of his brain. His ma called it divine, Becca called it weird, Steve said it was guts, and Natasha instinct. To Bucky, he just knew, but most people found that weird, so he said, “He just… I don’t know. You stopped smiling.”

The woman hesitated a second longer, peering at him, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. Then she smiled again and said, “Okay.”

Bucky met her eyes and found himself matching her smile. “Beer or breakfast?”

“Beer. Definitely beer. It’s the best at washing away vamp dust.”

Bucky laughed. “It’s the best at washing away a lot of things. Fair warning, though. My friends are inside, and they… They mean well, but they’re idiots, all of them, and will probably try their best to embarrass the shit out of me.”

The woman gave a slow nod. “I get it. Not the embarrassment part because that’s usually me. My friends tend to be overbearing and overprotective. Such as…” She twisted her hand to point up at the sky. Or, more accurately, at the roof of the bar. Perched on the edge was an enormous man with epically long blond hair blowing in the breeze. He held a hammer in his hand, and he gave Bucky a slow nod as they locked eyes.

Then he spun his hammer and flew away.

“What.”

The woman laughed. “That was Thor,” she said as she fell into step beside him, closer than she’d been to the vampire, understandably so, but closer than civility encouraged, enough for him to feel the heat of her, for him to nearly touch her. "And I’m Darcy, by the way. Darcy, the vampire slayer.”

*


End file.
